How You Can Support Families Affected by the Texas Floods
The floods began early on the morning of July 4, when the area around the Guadalupe River was full with people celebrating the holiday weekend and the area's many overnight camps were in session. Flash floods caused the river to rise 26 feet in 45 minutes, Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring said. Many people failed to receive alerts and were caught off guard by the early-morning storm.
The number of child deaths makes the disaster even more heartbreaking. Camp Mystic, a nearly 100-year-old summer camp in Kerr County, had 750 girls enrolled at the time of the flood. Most were able to escape to higher ground, but a number of young girls were in cabins located much closer to the river. The camp has been a favorite of political families—Lyndon B. Johnson's children and grandchildren went there, and Laura Bush was once a camp counselor. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the camp's director Dick Eastland also died on July 4 while trying to rescue campers.
Many people are questioning whether better alert systems and evacuation plans could have saved lives. 'There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing, and Monday morning quarterbacking,' said Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose congressional district includes Kerr County, Texas. 'There's a lot of people saying 'why' and 'how,' and I understand that.'
If you're looking for ways to support those affected by the floods, here are some organizations that are helping.
Serving the hard hit area of Kerr County, the fund will provide grants to nonprofits, first responders, and local government working in response, relief, and recovery.
Visit the Website
The Red Cross and partner organizations are providing emergency and reunification shelters. They also have volunteers providing mental health services that can be accessible by phone.
Texas Search and Rescue is a nonprofit volunteer organization that provides search and rescue efforts. They have deployed volunteers, K-9 units, and boats for a long-term search and rescue mission.
The José Andrés-founded organization, which has provided food in disaster-hit areas like Gaza, Haiti, and Ukraine, has set up an operation in central Texas.
Visit the Website
The pediatric hospital system has launched a fund that will support flood victims directly, as well as programming designed to serve those who were impacted.
Visit the Website
The organization's Emergency Disaster Services division is in Central Texas serving meals, distributing essential personal items, and offering emotional and spiritual care.
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CNBC
7 hours ago
- CNBC
Trump visits Texas flood zone, defends government's disaster response
President Donald Trump defended the state and federal response to deadly flash flooding in Texas on Friday as he visited the stricken Hill Country region, where at least 120 people, including dozens of children, perished a week ago. During a roundtable discussion after touring Kerr County, the epicenter of the disaster, Trump praised both Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for their response, saying they both did an "incredible job." The Trump administration, as well as local and state officials, has faced mounting questions over whether more could have been done to protect and warn residents ahead of the flooding, which struck with astonishing speed in the pre-dawn hours on July 4, the U.S. Independence Day holiday. Trump reacted with anger when a reporter said some families affected by the floods had expressed frustration that warnings did not go out sooner. "I think everyone did an incredible job under the circumstances," he said. "I don't know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that." Some critics have questioned whether the administration's spending cuts at the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates the U.S. government's disaster response efforts, might have exacerbated the calamity. Trump officials have said that cuts had no impact on the NWS's ability to forecast the storms, despite some vacancies in local offices. But the president has largely sidestepped questions about his plans to shrink or abolish FEMA and reassign many of its key functions to state and local governments. "I'll tell you some other time," Trump said on Tuesday, when asked by a reporter about FEMA. Before the most recent flooding, Kerr County declined to install an early-warning system after failing to secure state money to cover the cost. Lawrence Walker, 67, and a nearly three-decade veteran resident of Kerrville, said the county and state had not spent enough on disaster prevention, including an early-warning system. Asked about the quality of the government response, he said, "It's been fine since the water was at 8 feet." The Texas state legislature will convene in a special session later this month to investigate the flooding and provide disaster relief funding. Abbott has dismissed questions about whether anyone was to blame, calling that the "word choice of losers." Search teams on Friday were still combing through muddy debris littering parts of the Hill Country in central Texas, looking for the dozens still listed as missing, but no survivors have been found since the day of the floods. Heavy rains sent a wall of water raging down the Guadalupe River early on July 4, causing the deadliest disaster of the Republican president's nearly six-month term in office. As sun poked through dark clouds on Friday morning, search crews in hard hats painstakingly walked inch-by-inch along the ruined banks of the river, marking damage and looking through wreckage. After the president arrived in Kerr County in the early afternoon, Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott drove to an area near the river, where Trump received a briefing from first responders amid debris left in the wake of the flood. The county is located in what is known as "flash flood alley," a region that has seen some of the country's deadliest floods. More than a foot of rain fell in less than an hour on July 4. Flood gauges showed the river's height rose from about a foot to 34 feet (10.4 meters) in a matter of hours, cascading over its banks and sweeping away trees and structures in its path. Kerr County officials say more than 160 people remain unaccounted for, although experts say that the number of people reported missing in the wake of disasters is often inflated. The dead in the county include 67 adults and at least 36 children, many of whom were campers at the nearly century-old Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer retreat on the banks of the river. Jon Moreno, 71, a longtime Kerrville resident whose property on high ground was spared, praised the government response - local and federal. He has heard the debate about what more could have been done - including sirens - but said he did not think it would have made much difference, given people's desire to build along the flood-prone riverbanks. "It's unavoidable," he said. "All those people along the river - I wouldn't want to live there ... It's too dangerous." At Stripes, a gas station in Kerrville, the building was tagged in large white letters, accusing "Trump's Big Beautiful Bill" of cutting "our emergency funding." The president's massive legislative package, which cut taxes and spending, won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress last week and was signed into law by Trump on the same day that the flooding hit Texas.
Boston Globe
16 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Texas county flagged need for flood alarm months before tragedy
But by the time floodwaters raged down the Guadalupe River the morning of July 4, killing at least 121, including at least 36 children, no such alarm system had been installed in Kerr County. Advertisement The October warning, part of a 220-page 'hazard mitigation' report addressing threats that counties are required to send periodically to FEMA, followed years of failed attempts by local officials to secure funding for such a system, according to records and interviews with local officials. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The New York Times identified at least three occasions between 2017 and 2024 when local officials sought funding for a flood warning system but were rebuffed by the state. Those came though the federal government made billions available for disaster-reduction projects — including $1.9 billion to Texas over the past decade, to be spent at the discretion of state officials, according to a Times analysis. The Texas Division of Emergency Management rejected a 2017 request from Kerr County because it did not meet federal requirements, according to spokesperson Wes Rapaport. Those included a completed plan for addressing natural disasters. Advertisement The state rejected a 2018 request from the county because state officials chose to focus on counties affected by Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm that caused flooding across large portions of Texas in August 2017, Rapaport said. Kerr County, a popular resort area northwest of San Antonio with only about 50,000 full-time residents, was not among those counties. Since 2018, Kerr County officials submitted no other grant applications for flood warning systems to the state emergency management office, according to Rapaport. A FEMA spokesperson said the Trump administration was shifting the agency 'to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.' Last year, a separate body, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, sought money for a warning system through the Texas Water Development Board, which funds flood-control projects. That effort was also unsuccessful. The board offered to match just 5 percent of the cost, according to public records. The river authority, whose jurisdiction includes the portions of the river where most of the deaths occurred, decided it was not enough money to proceed. The authority's president, William Rector, said in an interview he believed his organization did not get more money 'because we're considered a rich county.' He said he did not recall why the authority waited until 2024 to apply, referring questions to other representatives who did not respond to requests for comment. 'I've been really insistent on getting a system in place,' Rector said, adding the county in April hired a contractor to begin work on a warning system, spending $73,000 of its own money. 'I wish our timing had been better.' Advertisement In a statement, a spokesperson for the Texas Water Development Board said the grant offered to the river authority was limited to 5 percent of the project's cost based on criteria that included the area's average household income. The board said it offered an interest-free loan to cover the rest. It is not clear how many lives, if any, would have been saved by an alarm system. But other flood-prone counties have alert systems, and after the Kerr County flood, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said there 'should have been sirens here.' If local officials could not afford it, he added, 'then the state will step up.' Officials in Kerr County did not respond to detailed questions about their efforts to install a warning system. 'Our city and county leadership are committed to a transparent and full review of past actions,' officials in Kerr County and Kerrville, the county's largest city, said in a statement. 'Our entire focus since day one has been rescue and reunification.' The lack of an alert system in Kerr County is now drawing scrutiny amid questions over whether government inaction left people more vulnerable to flooding. While the abrupt and explosive nature of the storm caused clear challenges, the potential for a catastrophic flood was widely known. Yet neither county, state, nor federal officials took the steps that many experts and local leaders felt could have made people safer. 'The more I'm finding out about it, the more I'm getting pissed off,' said Raymond Howard, a city councilor in Ingram, in Kerr County, referring to how often the county discussed a flood warning system without getting funding. 'They spend money on all types of other stuff. It just makes me very sad that they talked about it but never followed through with it.' Advertisement Howard said he knew some people thought any discussion about blame was premature, but disagreed. 'If we don't talk about it now and get the fire underneath everybody, it's going to get shuffled again. And I don't want to see that,' he said. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the state Legislature would investigate the floods. But he also pushed back against efforts to assign blame, calling it 'the word choice of losers.' Nonetheless, the disaster has highlighted a range of potential failures. Some of the buildings at Camp Mystic, the Christian camp where at least 27 girls and counselors were lost to the flooding, were inside an area that experts call the 'floodway' — a designation that indicates an exceptionally high risk of flooding, and one where construction is generally prohibited. In addition, while many experts credit the National Weather Service with issuing up-to-the-minute flash flood warnings, some questioned whether key vacancies in local weather service offices hurt the agency's ability to coordinate with emergency management officials. Kerr County's inability to get help paying for a flood warning system is all the more striking because of a shift in US disaster policy in recent years that made disaster-protection money far easier to obtain. After Hurricane Harvey inundated Texas in 2017, the start of a series of record-breaking disasters across the country, the federal government shifted its approach to protecting Americans from more frequent and severe weather catastrophes. Instead of simply rebuilding communities after disasters, the government provided more money to build protections ahead of time. The approach, championed by the first Trump administration, became supercharged under the Biden administration, with billions of dollars directed to those preparations. Advertisement One of the greatest beneficiaries was Texas: nearly $1.9 billion through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program went to the state over the past decade. The way FEMA structured that program gave the Texas Division of Emergency Management authority to decide which projects, in which counties, received the funds. Over the past decade, that money has been approved for disaster warning systems in more than two dozen of the 254 counties in Texas, federal records show. The episode highlights a major flaw in America's disaster defenses, according to Roy Wright, who managed risk-reduction programs at FEMA during the first Trump administration. Because so many levels of government are involved, it is impossible to know who is responsible. 'Big risks aren't getting to the top of the list for funding,' said Wright, who now runs the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. 'Clearly, it needs to be different.' County officials began trying to install a warning system along the Guadalupe River after floodwaters swept down the nearby Blanco River on Memorial Day weekend 2015. The flood ripped through the Hill Country town of Wimberley, killing 13 people. Some residents argued blaring outdoor sirens would ruin the natural feel of the area many prized. 'The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,' then-county commissioner Buster Baldwin said during a 2016 meeting. 'I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all.' Still, commissioners hired a local engineer, identified grant money, and worked with a grant writer to apply to the Texas Department of Emergency Management for federal money, according to county meeting minutes from January 2017. The cost: about $976,000. Advertisement The plan would have added 10 gauges to measure rising water at river crossings and created a system for warnings to be shared with the sheriff, emergency managers, and the public, according to a description shared at the meeting. The state denied the application in 2017, the county commissioners said, according to meeting minutes. There are signs, though, that sirens may be in place for future flooding. Soon after the recent tragedy, Patrick said the state would pay for a warning system. 'Whatever the problem was, why they didn't have them, we're moving on,' the lieutenant governor said. This article originally appeared in
The Hill
19 hours ago
- The Hill
As Kerr County leaders avoid alert questions, new audio surfaces in CodeRED timeline
KERR COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) – Dispatch audio has surfaced from the critical hours before a deadly flood hit its height in Kerr County, helping piece together the timeframe local officials have yet to provide amid public scrutiny of their decisions on July 4. 'We still have water coming up,' an Ingram volunteer firefighter is heard telling a county sheriff dispatcher at 4:22 a.m. 'The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39. Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?' LISTEN: Ingram volunteer firefighter calls Kerr County dispatch during deadly July 4 flood, requesting CodeRED alert. CodeRED is a notification system some agencies use to send emergency alerts to subscribers' cell phones. Online, the county encourages residents to sign up for the free service, which 'has the ability to notify the entire county or only the affected areas' about emergency situations – including severe weather – 'in a matter of minutes.' In the recording obtained by KXAN investigators from a credible source, the dispatcher then tells the firefighter: 'We have to get that approved with our supervisor. Just be advised we do have the Texas water rescue en route.' The timing of that request came more than three hours after the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning – at 1:14 a.m. – for a portion of the county and around 20 minutes after the federal forecasting agency warned of a flash flood emergency – at 4:03 a.m. – in the area. It is still unclear at what time CodeRED alerts went out, as local officials have largely sidestepped related questions. Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring, Jr. told reporters the only CodeRED notification he received was at 6 a.m., indicating a flash flood alert or 'something to that effect.' Ceslie Armstrong, who identified herself as a San Antonio-based producer and journalist – and longtime Hill Country resident who is subscribed to CodeRED – provided KXAN investigators with call recordings and text messages she said she received during the flood. The first was a text received at 5:34 a.m., saying a 'The NWS has issued a Flash Flood Warning for your… location.' It was followed a minute later by a pre-recorded audio message, saying the same, adding to 'take immediate action for your protection.' CodeRED alerts from Kerr County on July 4 (Courtesy Ceslie Armstrong) Another person near the flooded area who spoke with KXAN shared a cell phone screenshot, showing a much earlier alert time with a voicemail left at 1:14 a.m. from a number traced back to CodeRED. It suggests inconsistencies in recipients countywide. Responding to CodeRED concerns during a Wednesday press event, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said an 'after action' review would happen after recovery and notifying victims' families. 'I know that's going to be asked over and over,' Leitha said. 'Please understand that… We're not going to hide from everything, that's going to be checked into at a later time.' On Thursday morning, officials updated the county's death toll to 96. A total of 161 people were still missing. County commissioners approved the use of CodeRED in 2009 for $25,000 a year. On the county's website, it states the 'system delivered pre-recorded emergency phone messages' when 'rapid and accurate notification is essential for life safety.' Historically, the sheriff has had the ultimate authority on sending an alert to the public. KXAN is awaiting a response and fulfillment of records requests we made to the county and other local officials to better understand decisions regarding the notifications during this flood. On Tuesday, Leitha told reporters: 'It's not that easy, and you just push a button. OK? There's a lot more to that.' When asked if that happened, he responded: 'I can't tell you at this time.' Critics point to challenges with CodeRED using publicly available phone numbers and voluntary registration to send texts, voicemails and emails – meaning warnings may not reach all residents or visitors in a disaster area. However, the company behind CodeRED has explained it can also utilize IPAWS, the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System funded by FEMA – which alerts all phones in a geographical area, regardless of enrolling in the system. According to FEMA, 135 Texas agencies or entities use IPAWS, including Kerr County and the City of Kerrville. 'Each local jurisdiction independently determines their intended use of tools such as CodeRED as well as their local process to dispatch notifications and alerts using the tool,' a CodeRED corporate spokesperson told KXAN investigators. 'Local governments also determine whether to send alerts through IPAWS during the alert creation process within CodeRED.' In 2012, The Kerrville Daily Times reported 18,451 people had signed up for CodeRED alerts in the area. In 2020, county commissioners approved incorporating IPAWS into CodeRED, so that tourists could be reached even if they were not in the local database, according to meeting minutes and a video archive KXAN investigators reviewed. 'The easiest way to explain it is, say you're traveling through this area and we've had something happen here, it could still notify you if we send it out,' former Kerr County Sheriff William 'Rusty' Hierholzer told commissioners in a November 2020 meeting. Since last week's flood, officials have fielded questions regarding the effectiveness of CodeRED alerts in the county's rural areas where cell service can be spotty. Officials have also said many of the children at camps along the Guadalupe River did not have phones with them.
